I never really loved managing an economy in the first place, and slamming up against the guardrails as I was trying to produce a legion of Mutalisks in various harebrained StarCraft schemes. If Mortal Kombat is a grotesque celebration of 100-hit combos and old-school arcade depravity, then this studio wished to celebrate the full-scale pyrotechnic throwdowns that define our favourite tactical successes. So yes, Supreme Commander is a little bit silly, but only as a way to summon up the primal joys of real-time strategy. (Image credit: Square Enix) Step on the gas These are the sort of firefights dreamt up by the most perverted Warhammer sickos an endless tide of shocktroopers born into battle and living five-second lives. Are you being victimised by bombing raids? No problem, just encircle yourself with a battalion of flak cannons anywhere on the map. My favourite quirk? Anyone can send an engineer into a blazing firefight where it can happily plop down a fresh manufacturing operation totally divorced from any adjacent resources or supply lines. It's a philosophy that produced a gaucheness that likely turned off some of the traditionalists. The studio was clearly in love with their tech, and gave the player ample opportunity to fill the screen with as many troops as possible. (After all, Company of Heroes came out a year before.) I would never claim to be an expert of the genre, but after surviving the temporal horror of the boot-up, where it becomes excruciatingly clear that we're all deteriorating right alongside the video games we used to play, I can say for certain that Gas Powered Games got a bad rap. I have a faint memory of RTS diehards dismissing Supreme Commander while it was still at the peak of its influence, complaining that the game was more sizzle than steak compared to its deeper, but considerably uglier peers. You really can build anything, which means you need to be scared of everything. A chill ran up my spine as I realised that this fate has probably befallen all of its peers after all, it's been a while since I've seen Crysis up close, too. #GAMES LIKE SUPREME COMMANDER PC#How can that decay happen so quickly? Supreme Commander hasn't even celebrated its 20th anniversary, and yet its prime attribute has been absolutely obliterated by the PC power curve. It would've been right at home on the App Store, advertised in the bleakest corners of the web. They encircled the rival base and peppered it with raw, pixelated smoke and fire. The tank-shaped blobs that steadily pumped out of my munitions factory looked better, but not by much. The starchy textures of the earth stretched out in every direction, featureless and bland, almost Cruelty Squad-like in its disorienting uniformity. But reader, just look at what time hath wrought. The missiles are supposed to do the heavy lifting, right? So, a few power generators and mass extractors later, the war machine was up and running, and I was ready to make good on a derelict promise I made with my teenage self. Simply watching Supreme Commander run was half the appeal in its heyday, so I was not surprised that the campaign offered me a few paragraphs of sparse flavour text before dumping me into the barren grasslands crucial to the RTS experience. Gamers have rarely asked for much from a graphical standout beyond their aesthetics. (Image credit: Square Enix) Blowing off the dust Someday, I too will dump a ton of my hard-earned income into a top-tier gaming rig, and then I'll never be left in the dust ever again. As I soaked up those titanium-plated mechs and supersonic bombing runs of the gorgeous Supreme Commander dystopia, I made a private pact that should be familiar to the many other young men reading this story. Here I was stuck with, like, Mercenaries 2 while the adults in the room ran circles around us with the finely modelled tools of destruction deployed by Crytek and Relic. If you grew up almost exclusively on consoles like I did, you became accustomed to this beautiful heartache when the PC class laps whatever third-party ports emanating from the family TV. It sounds strange now, but there was a time in the mid-2000s where every GPU benchmark was set by the latest round of RTSes-much in the same way that Sony shows off new PlayStation tech with rain-slicked Lamborghinis in a sumptuous Gran Turismo suite.
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